The man suspected of wounding six people, including four children, with a knife in the French town of Annecy on June 8 could have been stopped if French security services had heeded the warning of the perpetrator’s ex-wife.
Abdalmasih Hanoun’s ex-wife, who is herself of Syrian origin, says she warned French and Swiss authorities about her former husband months before the attack. However, these authorities ignored her, according to the woman.
According to a report from the Daily Mail, a friend of the wife said: “They should have listened to her when she contacted them. Maybe it could have been stopped. “
Multiple media reports indicate that Hanoun allegedly fought in the Syrian civil war and was the only survivor of his unit in the army, the others having been killed by jihadists. When Sweden denied him citizenship, he left his wife and three-year-old daughter eight months ago and attempted to apply for asylum in Switzerland and France. Four days after his application was rejected in France, he went on a stabbing rampage in Annecy. He is charged with attempted murder and could be imprisoned for life.
“He was the only one surviving on his team,” a friend of the wife told the Daily Mail. After he fled from Syria, he stayed at a refugee camp before arriving in Sweden.
The wife only learned of the attack after a reporter called her about it. The friend of the ex-wife said: “She got home quickly and didn’t tell her colleagues where she was going. She couldn’t believe what she saw on the news and couldn’t bring herself to see the video of him attacking children. He never behaved like that in his life. He loved his own daughter more than himself.”
“After two years, we got married, but he couldn’t get Swedish citizenship, so he decided to leave the country. We split up because I didn’t want to leave Sweden,” she told Le Parisien over the phone. The Swedish Migration Authority confirmed that he had obtained a residence permit in 2013, but had failed several times to obtain nationality since 2017.
[pp id=80597]
French Minister of Interior Gerard Darmanin implied there could be a link between the man’s asylum application being refused and his decision to go on the rampage, calling it a “troubling coincidence.”
The man suspected of the attack had been told on June 4 that his application for asylum in France could not be accepted, as he had already held refugee status in Sweden for 10 years and was therefore legally present in France.
The 31-year-old Syrian had arrived in France eight months ago.
“For reasons that we can’t quite explain, he then applied for asylum in Switzerland, Italy and France, which he didn’t need to do because he already had asylum in Sweden,” explained the minister on TF1. “It is indeed a troubling coincidence that last Sunday he knew the answer from the French administration: No asylum since you already have it in Sweden, and then he went ahead with the act,” Darmanin said.
The case follows a number of similar stabbing attacks and murders targeting children, including a stabbing attack just last month on a Berlin playground involving a migrant scaling a fence and randomly stabbing two 8-year-old girls, a case from last year involving a migrant stabbing a child repeatedly in the head while she ate breakfast in her school, and the rape and murder of 12-year-old schoolgirl Lola. The case involving Lola, which received the most attention from the international media, led to widespread criticism of French President Emmanuel Macrons’ migrant policy and failure to deport criminal migrants.
